Thomas Nagel, Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress

Excerpt

Thomas Nagel has been one of the most influential philosophers of our time. His seminal article “What is it like to be a bat?”, published in 1974, started a revolution in what is now known as “consciousness studies”, by arguing that the subjective quality of conscious experience (for example what it is like to smell a rose, or taste coffee) cannot be captured by even the most exhaustive scientific account of a subject’s behaviour or the workings of its brain or nervous system. More recently, his Mind and Cosmos (2012) outraged the scientific establishment by maintaining that Darwinian principles (random mutation plus natural selection) could not, in the time available, have been sufficient to account for the emergence of conscious thought as an “instrument of transcendence, able to discern objective reality and objective value”. …